Why Reviews Are The Ultimate Marketing Tools (And How To Use Them To Build Your Business)

Reviews are important — you already know that. But are you leveraging them to help you to get more customers and clients that want your services?

If you are a small business owner, you already know that having customers come through your doors and use your services is the most important metric there is to running your business. Having customers means more revenue, which can lead to more money to reinvest into serving your customers, which leads to more happy customers (and good reviews), which leads to more revenue.

What you may not know is that your reviews, while you know that they can make you look good online, they also can be leveraged in a lot of special ways to get you more customers!

Why Reviews Are So Powerful

Reviews, as you already know, are social proof. Reviews are evidence of the quality of a service, product, or company, coming from 3rd parties that have already used and experienced them before you did.

While BAD reviews can drive away business, GOOD reviews bring it in!

If you can get your prospects to see social proof that shows that your service, products and brand are what they are looking for in their exact, current situation, you are much more likely to turn them into a new customer.

Studying Consumer Behavior

When you look for a business to serve your needs online, how do you do it? Where do you go to find it? What exactly do you look for?

For me, I usually go straight to Google or Yelp! to find a business that serves my needs. If I am looking for a great Thai restaurant that knows how to make Pad See Ew (my favorite dish as a child), I go and look for reviews and pictures of the food of each potential restaurant.

I check the reviews for relevant content and keywords (like ‘Pad See Ew’, and ‘delicious’, etc). I also check to see the total number of reviews, and the aggregate score (ie. ‘4.89 out of 5 stars’). If there are accompanying pictures, I also check to see the visual quality of the food.

I may even call the restaurant to confirm that what I think they have is there — so I can avoid wasting too much of my time trying a place that I don’t like.

Wherever I can save time and still get great results — that’s a big win in my book.

Many other consumers (especialy Gen X, Y and millenials) are like this as well! The internet has become this great place where anyone can find anything that we are looking for within minutes.

Finding Creative Ways to Use Reviews

To leverage reviews and testimonials in your business, it would be wise to place them wherever your brand’s presence is already felt! On your website, in your social media content, in your emails, etc.

Here is a list of high-impact creative ways to use reviews to build up your business:

1. Ads

Using a snippet of a testimonial or review in an ad is a creative way can get more clicks and drive more traffic to your brand’s offers.

2. General Website Pages

Adding reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers is a great way to pique the interests of prospects that are visiting important pages on your website, like on your “About” page, “Services” page or on your landing pages.

3. Email Signature

Add reviews and testimonials to your email signature! This way, all of the emails that you send day-to-day will have the most powerful examples of social proof included. PRO TIP: This works great with a solid call-to-action for lead generation, a content upgrade, or a direct link to the special offer page for the product that you are trying to sell.

4. Case Studies

When detailing past and current client campaigns that you are proud of, you should most definitely add reviews to the document and also to the call to action, as it helps to add legitimacy to the study.

5. Next To CTAs

Speaking of calls to action, your reviews and testimonials would greatly help to boost your call-to-action conversion rates. This means if you have an email list sign-up, a testimonial would be great to include nearby somewhere. If you have a content download of some sort, add some social proof by including a satisfied customer’s review of the download on the landing page next to the button to get it!

6. Social Media Posts

With everyone (it seems) on social media nowadays, it would make sense that you share those positive reviews and testimonials to promote your content or to push your product. Here is a great example of social media post (also a facebook ad) that uses a past 5-star rating to promote their visor to prospects.

7. Testimonials Page

Testimonials pages are a great way to showcase satisfied customer reviews in a prominent place on your website. Below is the testimonials page for a client of mine which I believe is a great example of this in action.

8. Email or Messenger Marketing Sequences

Great reviews can be repurposed to become testimonials featured and/or quoted in your automated email and Facebook messenger sequences when explaining what it is you do, or why your clients love to work with you. Below is a link to an example of a drip email campaign used by Close.io:

Click the image above to see it in full size.

In Conclusion

Crafting and creating testimonials from your satisfied reviews is just the beginning! Being able to create content around them is how you leverage the happiness from your past clients and directly affect the chances that your future prospects also become your future clients.

Once you have great reviews, it’s absolutely imperitive that you start utilizing them to maximize your prospects in your current and future promotions.

If you work on integrating testimonials into your business using these examples above as inspiration, you will be well on your way to reaching your ROI targets and Revenue goals.